It was always about this time of year, when the azaleas and dogwoods began to bloom and the temperatures began to rise and summer began to seem tantalizingly close, when the local short track used to open. It was a modest place set back among the pine trees, with wooden bleachers and a gravel infield and a concrete retaining wall that bore the scuff marks of accidents cleaned up long ago. But it was high-banked, and it was notoriously fast, and the drivers who sacrificed so much to converge on the place every Saturday night absolutely loved it.

It was a proud place populated by tough men who poured their entire savings into a late model car, or sacrificed their marriages for those Saturday nights, all for a shot at a trophy and a winner's check that wasn't nearly enough to pay the bills.

Ultimately, it became a victim of changing times -- struggling to get people into the grandstand, struggling to increase car counts as the price of racing escalated even at the lowest levels, struggling to keep up with the newer, publicly funded arenas that the other local sports teams called home. A few years ago the owner recognized the inevitable and sold the place to a real estate development firm, wisely cashing out before the market began to turn sour, making about 10 times what he had originally invested to buy the track decades earlier. What remains is a subdivision where residents sometimes turn up an old tire or an old piece of sheet metal when they dig a hole to plant a tree, reminders that the race track may be gone, but the memories still linger.

It wasn't famous, it didn't produce drivers who went on to compete at the sport's top levels, and very few except those who raced there would even recognize the facility's name. It was just a .4-mile track in rural part of a small state. But it was around for 39 years, 20 of those under NASCAR sanctioning, and it produced two national champions in the sport's weekly racing division. It was a proud place populated by tough men who poured their entire savings into a late model car, or sacrificed their marriages for those Saturday nights, all for a shot at a trophy and a winner's check that wasn't nearly enough to pay the bills. The track's final champion was a longshoreman who built cars with his father and gave up his inheritance to go racing. Nobody ever questioned why. They'd have all done the same thing.

There were always those old school buses parked behind Turn 4, lumbering vehicles that the track owner would roll out for a kind of celebrity race, putting local TV anchors behind the wheel. There was always a controversy or an argument or a claim that track management favored this guy or that guy, the kind of thing endemic at local tracks. There were always rumors of fistfights behind the grandstands, late in the night, competitors settling on-track incidents in their own way. There was the time one of the top drivers became so enraged at a ruling, he ran across the track while the cars were still circling to get to the scorer's booth. He was suspended for the rest of the season, an effective excommunication for someone who lived for Saturday nights under the lights. (Continued)